MICROSOFT DEVELOPS 3D TOUCH SCREEN

Software giant Microsoft has reportedly developed a 3D touchscreen that shows images which can be felt and manipulated.

It includes an LCD flat panel screen with force sensors and a robotic arm that moves it back and forwards and by controlling how much resistance there is to a user's fingertip the device can simulate the shape and weight of objects shown on screen, BBC reports.

According to the report, Microsoft said that the device can have both medical and gaming uses. 

Senior researcher Michael Pahud said that when the finger pushes on the touchscreen and the senses merge with stereo vision, if convergence is done correctly and visuals are updated constantly so that they correspond to the finger's depth perception, it will be enough for the brain to accept the virtual world as real.

The report said that the company has created a demonstration using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of a brain to show how a medic could navigate through the different slices by pushing their finger against the display allowing them to draw notes and leave a 'haptic detent', or force-feedback marker - at certain layers to make it easier to find them again later on.

Pahud said that the ' haptic detent' can be extended to flag up potential problems is encountering an anomaly like a tumour, because one can change the response based on what they touch.

Dr Peter Weller, head of the Centre for Health Infomatics at City University, London, is concerned that Microsoft's screen would not be able to give an accurate enough indication of textures because if it was going to be used in the real world it would have to respond to rapidly changing shapes.

Weller further said that if technology like Tactus , which has developed a screen with tiny channels of fluid which allows bumps to pop up to simulate the feel of button, is combined with Microsoft's innovation it could prove useful for a doctor to do teleconsultancy work adding that it would mean the patient could be in another country or hospital and the doctor could feel their glands or abdomen from a distance, the report added. 

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INTERNET-BASED BUSINESS TO TOUCH $100BN BY 2015

Internet-based businesses such as online advertising and e-commerce are slated to touch USD 100 billion size by 2015, a report by Economist Intelligence Unit has said.

"Even in India, where only 10 per cent of the population is online, 1.6 per cent of GDP is attributed to the rise of the Internet. This is expected to double by 2015 to be worth USD 100 billion -? the same size as the nation's healthcare industry today," the report said.

It added that one of the key factor that will drive the Internet economy in India is digital and mobile advertising.

The report 'Good to Grow: The Environment of Asia?s Internet Business' said that at present, advertising revenue in India is at 7 per cent but out of the USD 410 million being spent online, 60 percent goes to Google and Facebook, with only the remaining 40 per cent going to other online players.

The World Economic Forum's Network Readiness Index puts Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong in the top 20 countries globally for the quality of their digital infrastructure but India, Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines sit at the opposite end of the spectrum, it said.

"There are also sizeable urban versus rural differences. For example, only 3.6 per cent of the 833 million Indians living in rural areas are active Internet users, and one-third of those have to travel for more than ten miles to visit a cybercafe," it said.

The study, however, sounded optimistic on spread of Internet usage with help of government's effort in pipeline.

But the report raised concern on low level of credit card penetration in India checking growth of e-commerce.

"On both fronts, India stands at an abysmally low penetration of 2 per cent compared to South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore," the report said.

It raised issue of Internet laws in India and said "poorly worded or confusingly interpreted pieces of legislation?notably those in India and Thailand?create uncertainty for business owners, as well as high administrative costs in order to put safeguards in place."

Speaking at the launch of the report, Laurel West of Economist Intelligence Unit said "While the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology is responsible for the frequent issue of laws relating to Internet governance, there is no specific regulatory body for content and platform creators."

He added that there is no central avenue for communication with businesses that will be affected by changes in the law. 

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YAHOO BUYS EMAIL MANAGEMENT APPLICATION XOBNI

San Francisco: Yahoo forged ahead on its months-long take-over binge with word that it had bought Xobni, a start-up behind tools for better managing contact lists and email inboxes.

Yahoo did not disclose how much it paid for Xobni - which is "inbox" spelled backwards - but said it planned to use the start-up's technology to improve Yahoo Mail, Messenger and other "communications offerings". San Francisco-based Xobni was launched in 2006, and two years later the venture-backed firm hired Yahoo executive Jeff Bonforte as chief.

A message posted at the Xobni blog on Wednesday indicated that the team was settling in to new digs at Yahoo's main campus in the Silicon Valley city of Sunnyvale.

"This is just the type of gig we've been preparing for throughout our history," Xobni said. "Soon, you'll be able to use Yahoo! products with Xobni goodness baked right in."

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REAL INVENTOR OF THE MOUSE DIES

Engelbart was decades ahead of world

04 Jul 2013 09:22 | by Nick Farrell in Rome

Douglas Engelbart, the man who invented the mouse and mapped out the future of the internet decades before anyone else, has died aged 88.

Engelbart, in 1968, demoed a cubic device with two rolling discs called an "X-Y position indicator for a display system." It was the first time the world had seen a mouse.

To cap it off Engelbart conducted the first video conference. And he explained a theory of how pages of information could be tied together using text-based links, an idea that would later form the bedrock of the web.

Engelbart should have been more wealthy than the Pope and be a household name, but he wasn't because he belonged to an era when computing was mostly done by government researchers.

He didn't want explosive wealth and did not receive any royalties for the mouse, which SRI patented and later licensed to Apple for $40,000.  It released its first commercial mouse with the Lisa computer in 1983.

Apple's Steve Jobs is still popularly acclaimed as the inventor of the mouse and made a killing off it and many Apple fanboys have no idea who Engelbart was.

But Engelbart was more of a futurist and loved the idea computers could be used to enhance the mind.

In 1961 he wrote a research proposal at SRI where he said that the possibilities involve an integrated man-machine working relationship.

Needless to say, for someone who was that much a visionary, he was ostracised by the status quo at different points of his life. What makes him significant was that he was proved right.

Tragically, he watched as entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates became celebrity billionaires by realising some of his early ideas.

He felt that the last two decades of his life had been a failure because he could not receive funding for his research or "engage anybody in a dialogue".

Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation told Reuters that the internet and the World Wide Web were an enormous vindication of his vision.

Kapor said that Engelbart was like Leonardo da Vinci envisioning the helicopter hundreds of years before they could actually be built. 

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MODEST SATELLITES SOAR IN HIGH ALTITUDE DEMONSTRATION

Students and engineers participate in a prelaunch briefing before liftoff of the Prospector P-18 rocket. 

June 18, 2013 —Four little shuttle sailed over the California desert June 15 in a high-height showing flight that tried the sensor and gear plans made by Nasa builds and person launch groups. 

The satellites, regarded as Cubesats, lifted off from the Friends of Amateur Rocketry start site in the Mojave Desert on board a Prospector 18 rocket, constructed by Garvey Spacecraft Corp. of Long Beach. 

Information recorded by the Cubesats' installed sensors throughout Saturday's flight test will assist portray nature and loads the little satellites experienced throughout flight --informative data that is discriminating to the researchers and architects improving comparable space apparatus for future missions. 

Cubesats are 4-inch 3d squares that pack a great deal of ability into their minor size. While they commonly fly as optional payloads on bigger missions including greater space apparatus and rockets, the objective is to in the end have the alternative of starting them as the essential payload on more modest rockets. 

Saturday's flight test was a discriminating go send in the advancement of such missions. 

Test group staff appeared for the launch site as the sun started to ascent. At 10:52 a.m. Pacific Time, the Prospector rocket's single fluid energized motor touched off and the vehicle rapidly climbed above the desert scene, arriving at a top height of in the ballpark of 9,000 feet. The vehicle's parachutes discharged rashly, however the rocket proceeded its way, coasting and tumbling, at last arriving on its agree with its diminutive payload still tucked securely inside. 

However the early parachute organization and hard arriving are not recognized setbacks, as per Garrett Skrobot, the High Altitude Demonstration Mission's undertaking administrator at Nasa's Kennedy Space Center. 

"We think as of it a victory in light of the fact that we were fit to test out all the trials, and this flight additionally demonstrates the flexibility of the examinations we were flying," Skrobot said. "What we studied was that we're ready to fly four payloads with new equipment in a sudden environment --and they performed." 

"The entire focus is to test these frameworks before going onto the following vehicle," he included. 

Each of the four Cubesats was intended to test or assess diverse parts of the flight. All were recovered from the rocket in the wake of arriving, and colleagues as of recently are working to recuperate however much information as could be expected under the circumstances from the satellites' memory cards. 

Two person constructed shuttle were intended to work together to record the earth. Cp-9, constructed by the California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, and Stangsat, made by scholars at Merritt Island High School in Florida, additionally were wanted to show the capacity to speak with one another through an installed Wi-Fi association. 

The pair, which bear the harsh ride with insignificant harm, are slated to fly on board a Falcon 9 rocket throughout Spacex's fifth business resupply benefits mission to the International Space Station. 

The Rocket University Broad Initiatives Cubesat, or Rubics-1, was committed by Kennedy workers taking part in the core's Rocket University arrangement. The rocket was instrumented to look at the exhibition of another, lightweight form of the satellites' bearer, constructed by Tyvak of Irvine, Calif. 

Phonesat, assembled by Nasa's Ames Research Center in California, exploit cell phones' energy, memory and Polaroid innovations, minimized size, and off-the rack accessibility for the advancement of ease rocket. Rubics and Phonesat gained information throughout the flight. 

Members will exploit the studying chance managed by Saturday's flight abnormality to evaluate what they have to change as they recondition the satellites for upcoming missions. 

"I inquired as to whether they'd need to fly again in four to six months," Skrobot said. "The response was an unanimous "yes." " 

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SUN EMITS A SOLSTIC CME

This image from June 20, 2013, at 11:15 p.m. EDT shows the bright light of a solar flare on the left side of the sun and an eruption of solar material shooting through the sun’s atmosphere, called a prominence eruption. Shortly thereafter, this same region of the sun sent a coronal mass ejection out into space.

June 22, 2013 — On June 20, 2013, at 11:24 p.m., the sun erupted with an Earth-directed coronal mass ejection or CME, a solar phenomenon that can send billions of tons of particles into space that can reach Earth one to three days later. These particles cannot travel through the atmosphere to harm humans on Earth, but they can affect electronic systems in satellites and on the ground.

This behavior suggests that primates who live in larger social groups tend to have more "social intelligence," a new study shows. The results appear June 27 in PLOS ONE.

A Duke University experiment tested whether living in larger social networks directly relates to higher social abilities in animals. Working with six different species of lemurs living at the Duke Lemur Center, a team of undergraduate researchers tested 60 individuals to see if they would be more likely to steal a piece of food if a human wasn't watching them.

In one test, a pair of human testers sat with two plates of food. One person faced the plate and the lemur entering the room, the other had his or her back turned. In a second, testers sat in profile, facing toward or away from the plate. In a third, they wore a black band either over their eyes or over their mouths and both faced the plates and lemurs.

As the lemurs jumped onto the table where the plates were and decided which bit of food to grab, the ones from large social groups, like the ringtailed lemur (Lemur catta), were evidently more sensitive to social cues that a person might be watching, said Evan MacLean, a research scientist in the Department Of Evolutionary Anthropology who led the research team. Lemurs from small-group species, like the mongoose lemur (Eulemur mongoz), were less sensitive to the humans' orientation.

Few of the lemurs apparently understood the significance of a blindfold.

The work is the first to test the relationship between group size and social intelligence across multiple species. The findings support the "social intelligence hypothesis," which suggests that living in large social networks drove the evolution of complex social cognition in primates, including humans, MacLean said.

Behavioral experiments are critical to test the idea because assumptions about intelligence based solely on brain size may not hold up, he said. Indeed, this study found that some lemur species had evolved more social smarts without increasing the size of their brains.

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TEN THOUSANDTH NEAR-EARTH OBJECT DISCOVERED IN SPACE

Asteroid 2013 MZ5 as seen by the University of Hawaii's PanSTARR-1 telescope.

June 25, 2013 — More than 10,000 asteroids and comets that can pass near Earth have now been discovered. The 10,000th near-Earth object, asteroid 2013 MZ5, was first detected on the night of June 18, 2013, by the Pan-STARRS-1 telescope, located on the 10,000-foot (convert) summit of the Haleakala crater on Maui. Managed by the University of Hawaii, the PanSTARRS survey receives NASA funding.

Ninety-eight percent of all near-Earth objects discovered were first detected by NASA-supported surveys.

"Finding 10,000 near-Earth objects is a significant milestone," said Lindley Johnson, program executive for NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA Headquarters, Washington. "But there are at least 10 times that many more to be found before we can be assured we will have found any and all that could impact and do significant harm to the citizens of Earth." During Johnson's decade-long tenure, 76 percent of the NEO discoveries have been made.

Near-Earth objects (NEOs) are asteroids and comets that can approach the Earth's orbital distance to within about 28 million miles (45 million kilometers). They range in size from as small as a few feet to as large as 25 miles (41 kilometers) for the largest near-Earth asteroid, 1036 Ganymed.

Asteroid 2013 MZ5 is approximately 1,000 feet (300 meters) across. Its orbit is well understood and will not approach close enough to Earth to be considered potentially hazardous.

"The first near-Earth object was discovered in 1898," said Don Yeomans, long-time manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Over the next hundred years, only about 500 had been found. But then, with the advent of NASA's NEO Observations program in 1998, we've been racking them up ever since. And with new, more capable systems coming on line, we are learning even more about where the NEOs are currently in our solar system, and where they will be in the future."

Of the 10,000 discoveries, roughly 10 percent are larger than six-tenths of a mile (one kilometer) in size -- roughly the size that could produce global consequences should one impact the Earth. However, the NASA NEOO program has found that none of these larger NEOs currently pose an impact threat and probably only a few dozen more of these large NEOs remain undiscovered.

The vast majority of NEOs are smaller than one kilometer, with the number of objects of a particular size increasing as their sizes decrease. For example, there are expected to be about 15,000 NEOs that are about one-and-half football fields in size (460 feet, or 140 meters), and more than a million that are about one-third a football field in size (100 feet, or 30 meters). A NEO hitting Earth would need to be about 100 feet (30 meters) or larger to cause significant devastation in populated areas. Almost 30 percent of the 460-foot-sized NEOs have been found, but less than 1 percent of the 100-foot-sized NEOs have been detected.

When it originated, the NASA-instituted Near-Earth Object Observations Program provided support to search programs run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory (LINEAR); the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (NEAT); the University of Arizona (Spacewatch, and later Catalina Sky Survey) and the Lowell Observatory (LONEOS). All these search teams report their observations to the Minor Planet Center, the central node where all observations from observatories worldwide are correlated with objects, and they are given unique designations and their orbits are calculated.

"When I began surveying for asteroids and comets in 1992, a near-Earth object discovery was a rare event," said Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center. "These days we average three NEO discoveries a day, and each month the Minor Planet Center receives hundreds of thousands of observations on asteroids, including those in the main-belt. The work done by the NASA surveys, and the other international professional and amateur astronomers, to discover and track NEOs is really remarkable."

Within a dozen years, the program achieved its goal of discovering 90 percent of near-Earth objects larger than 3,300 feet (1 kilometer) in size. In December 2005, NASA was directed by Congress to extend the search to find and catalog 90 percent of the NEOs larger than 500 feet (140 meters) in size. When this goal is achieved, the risk of an unwarned future Earth impact will be reduced to a level of only one percent when compared to pre-survey risk levels. This reduces the risk to human populations, because once an NEO threat is known well in advance, the object could be deflected with current space technologies.

Currently, the major NEO discovery teams are the Catalina Sky Survey, the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS survey and the LINEAR survey. The current discovery rate of NEOs is about 1,000 per year.

NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program manages and funds the search for, study of and monitoring of asteroids and comets whose orbits periodically bring them close to Earth. The Minor Planet Center is funded by NASA and hosted by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, MA. JPL manages the Near-Earth Object Program Office for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

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MARS WAS OXYGEN-RICH BILLION YEARS BEFORE EARTH

Washington: Mars might have had an oxygen-rich atmosphere at a time, about 4000 million years ago, well before the rise of atmospheric oxygen on earth around 2500 million years ago. 

This is the conclusion made by scientists from Oxford University who are investigating the compositions of Martian meteorites found on Earth and data from NASA's 'Spirit' rover that examined surface rocks in the Gusev crater on the red planet.

The fact that the surface rocks are five times richer in nickel than the meteorites was puzzling and had cast doubt on whether the meteorites are typical volcanic products of the red planet. 

"What we have shown is that both meteorites and surface volcanic rocks are consistent with similar origins in the deep interior of Mars but that the surface rocks come from a more oxygen-rich environment, probably caused by recycling of oxygen-rich materials into the interior," said Professor Bernard Wood, of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, who led the research reported in this week's Nature. 

"This result is surprising because while the meteorites are geologically 'young', around 180 million to 1400 million years old, the Spirit rover was analysing a very old part of Mars, more than 3700 million years old," Wood added. 

Whilst it is possible that the geological composition of Mars varies immensely from region to region the researchers believe that it is more likely that the differences arise through a process known as subduction - in which material is recycled into the interior. 

They suggest that the Martian surface was oxidised very early in the history of the planet and that, through subduction, this oxygen-rich material was drawn into the shallow interior and recycled back to the surface during eruptions 4000 million years ago. The meteorites , by contrast, are much younger volcanic rocks that emerged from deeper within the planet and so were less influenced by this process. 

As oxidation is what gives Mars its distinctive colour, Professor Wood believes that it is likely that the 'red planet' was wet, warm and rusty billions of years before Earth's atmosphere became oxygen rich. 

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